Rights Watch

A human rights group is asking Secretary of State Warren Christopher to block the sale of cluster bombs to Turkey on the grounds they might be used against Kurdish civilians. In a letter to Christopher released Tuesday, Human Rights Watch also urged tighter controls on future U.S. arms transfers to Turkey. It wants to see written guarantees that the arms would be used ''only in NATO contingencies or with the prior approval of the U.S. government.'' Turkish forces have long been fighting Kurdish guerrillas in the eastern part of the country.

Florida prosecutors "arbitrarily and unfairly" sent thousands of children into the state's adult justice system in recent years, most charged with non-violent offenses, a new report by an advocacy group states. The report by New York-based Human Rights Watch, titled "Branded for Life," takes aim at Florida's "direct file" statute, which gives prosecutors broad discretion to charge many underage teens accused of felonies as adults. According to the report, released Thursday, Florida leads all other states in charging juveniles as adults - more than 12,000 in the past five years, more than 60 percent of them charged with nonviolent felonies.

NEW YORK -- Five U.S. state-prison systems allow the use of trained attack dogs to control inmates -- a practice that until now has been kept secret in American prisons -- according to a Human Rights Watch report released Wednesday. The report says policies exist in Connecticut, Delaware, Iowa, South Dakota and Utah that allow guards to use "aggressive, unmuzzled" dogs to order inmates out of their cells when they refuse to leave. Dogs are ordered to bite prisoners if they resist. "Human Rights Watch knows of no other country in the world that authorizes the use of dogs to attack prisoners who will not voluntarily leave their cells," the report said.

The Big Event Tuesday we as a country will decide who will be the 44th president of the United States. And while you can stay up all night to watch the talking heads on all of the news channels tell us what is going to happen when we wake up, we decided to give you a list of some things you can do instead to pass the time while we wait to find out who the next leader of the free world will be. COLLEGE FOOTBALL: Sure, watching a 2-4 Miami of Ohio team...

The architects of Rwanda's genocide are rearming themselves in preparation for a violent return with the aid of France, Zaire, South Africa and other countries, a report by Human Rights Watch said Monday. The human rights group's report, based on a four-month field investigation in central Africa, said former Rwandan government and army officials have rebuilt their military infrastructure and created a force of 50,000 men in about a dozen refugee camps, primarily in eastern Zaire.

A Washington-based human rights group accused a renegade Liberian militia of increasing attacks on civilians, including raping and killing villagers and torturing them by scorching their genitals with red-hot machetes. A report Saturday by Human Rights Watch/Africa said the Liberia Peace Council was targeting civilians suspected of sympathizing with its fierce foe the National Patriotic Front of Liberia. The two factions have been battling since Liberian President Samuel Doe was deposed in a civil war in 1989.

WASHINGTON -- Globalization has created undeniable wealth and millions of jobs, but the current system leaves little room for human rights and other social values, Human Rights Watch said in a report Thursday. "International human-rights standards exist but are not uniformly ratified, effectively enforced or adequately integrated into the global economy," the New York-based group said in its 11th annual report. The report says respect for human rights and democracy is good for business.

MEXICO CITY - Serious and widespread human-rights violations continued in Mexico in 1999, including torture and arbitrary arrests, Human Rights Watch said in its annual report. In the report, released Thursday, the U.S.-based human-rights group said ``the gap between rhetorical support for human rights and their effective protection ... remained great.'' Despite a new federal initiative to promote and strengthen respect for human rights, ``another year passed in which Mexico's deeply rooted human-rights problems received inadequate attention from authorities,'' it said.

A New York-based human rights group has offered to work with China to verify the group's assertions that hundreds of people remain behind bars for participating in the 1989 democracy movement. China, which has denied the report as ''sheer fabrication,'' has not responded to the offer. Human Rights in China, which made the offer, and Human Rights Watch/Asia, also based in New York, last week listed the names, arrest dates and sentences of about 500 people jailed after the democracy protests.

JERUSALEM -- A leading human-rights organization charges in a report issued today that Palestinians who order and dispatch suicide bombers are guilty of war crimes and should be brought to justice. In a comprehensive 170-page report, the New York-based Human Rights Watch also said Palestinian Authority President Yasser Arafat bears "significant political responsibility" for the "repeated deliberate killing" of Israeli civilians. "The scale and systematic nature of these attacks in 2001 and 2002 meet the definition of a crime against humanity," the report states.

NEW YORK -- Five U.S. state-prison systems allow the use of trained attack dogs to control inmates -- a practice that until now has been kept secret in American prisons -- according to a Human Rights Watch report released Wednesday. The report says policies exist in Connecticut, Delaware, Iowa, South Dakota and Utah that allow guards to use "aggressive, unmuzzled" dogs to order inmates out of their cells when they refuse to leave. Dogs are ordered to bite prisoners if they resist. "Human Rights Watch knows of no other country in the world that authorizes the use of dogs to attack prisoners who will not voluntarily leave their cells," the report said.

UNITED NATIONS -- Officials of the United Nations have decided they must act within weeks to produce an alternative to its widely discredited Human Rights Commission to maintain hope of redeeming the United Nations' credibility in 2006. The commission, based in Geneva, has been a persistent embarrassment to the United Nations because participation has been open to countries such as Cuba, Sudan and Zimbabwe, members who are themselves accused of gross rights abuses. Libya held the panel's chairmanship in 2003.

WASHINGTON -- Three former members of the Army's 82nd Airborne Division say members of their battalion in Iraq routinely beat and abused prisoners in 2003 and 2004 to help gather intelligence on the insurgency and to amuse themselves. The new abuse allegations, the first involving members of the elite unit, are contained in a report by Human Rights Watch. They have also been reported by one of the soldiers, a decorated Army captain, to top aides of two senior Republicans on the Senate Armed Services Committee, Sens.

WASHINGTON -- Four U.S. soldiers were accused of murder in the death of a detainee in Afghanistan in 2002, but charges against all but one eventually were dropped, according to Pentagon officials who confirmed the previously undisclosed case Monday after it was uncovered by a human-rights group. The Pentagon also confirmed the death of another Afghan detainee earlier this year, bringing the number of known deaths of prisoners in that country to eight, according to Pentagon officials and recently released documents.

DAKAR, Senegal -- Human Rights Watch on Friday issued a stinging report accusing the Arab-led Sudanese government of joining Arab militias in attacks on black Africans in the Darfur region of western Sudan, clearing villages, destroying their food supplies and executing men deemed enemies. It came on a day that the United Nations' top human-rights body passed a resolution on human-rights abuses in Darfur that the United States rejected as too soft on Sudan. In an unusually strong report, based on interviews with Sudanese refugees across the border in Chad, a four-member team of investigators described the raids by the Arab militias as "a reign of terror."

WASHINGTON -- The State Department criticized Russia for manipulating elections and China for backsliding on human rights in a report Wednesday that also complained about the rights records of Pakistan and Turkey, despite their cooperation with the United States in fighting terrorism. Expressing disappointment at the lack of progress on human rights around the world, the department's annual analysis accused the Russian government of pressuring news organizations and political opponents and using other tactics to improperly influence the democratic process.

SAO PAULO, Brazil - Torture, beatings and summary executions are common occurrences in Brazil's severely overcrowded prison system, the U.S.-based Human Rights Watch said in a report released this week.Since the prisons are so full - some at twice their capacity - convicts are often held for their entire sentence in police station cells intended only for temporary detention.Such lockups themselves become overcrowded, often holding up to 200 people in a space designed for 40, and it is there that torture and violence are most widespread, Human Rights Watch said in its 150-page report.

DAKAR, Senegal -- Human Rights Watch on Friday issued a stinging report accusing the Arab-led Sudanese government of joining Arab militias in attacks on black Africans in the Darfur region of western Sudan, clearing villages, destroying their food supplies and executing men deemed enemies. It came on a day that the United Nations' top human-rights body passed a resolution on human-rights abuses in Darfur that the United States rejected as too soft on Sudan. In an unusually strong report, based on interviews with Sudanese refugees across the border in Chad, a four-member team of investigators described the raids by the Arab militias as "a reign of terror."

Three teenage boys from Afghanistan whose detention at the U.S. prison camp for terror suspects at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, sparked an international outcry were freed Thursday, military officials said. The boys, who were thought to be from 13 to 15 years old when they were brought to Joint Task Force-Guantanamo, were released after officials determined they no longer posed a threat to the United States, according to a Pentagon statement. They were flown to Afghanistan, where they are to be resettled by Afghan authorities with the assistance of UNICEF and other nongovernmental organizations.

The Bush administration's embrace of a democratization strategy for the postwar Middle East has triggered a torrent of scorn from the region's traditional political and intellectual elites, not to mention regional experts at the State Department and CIA. Less noticed is the fact that it has also produced a flurry of political reforms, quasi-reforms and grass-roots initiatives in countries across the region. Two days before the war began last week, the Palestinian legislative council dealt a major blow to the autocracy of Yasser Arafat, rejecting his attempt to limit the powers of a new prime minister.